Punta Music Has Never Been a Honduran ‘Thing,’ It Has Always Been a Black One

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Arts, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation on 2022-03-30 02:39Z by Steven

Punta Music Has Never Been a Honduran ‘Thing,’ It Has Always Been a Black One

Remezcla
2022-03-24

Julaiza Alvarez

Art by Stephany Torres for Remezcla.

I was 12 years old when I went to my first fedu, a Garifuna word for a traditional gathering or party in Honduras. I was intrigued by how comfortable everyone was: The women dressed in traditional garments danced to the beat of the drum and sang to the sound of hands clapping. It was effortless. I had never seen anything like it. While I had been to family functions and seen my aunts dance, this did not compare. It was mesmerizing, especially with everyone being Black. It was different, and it set me on a journey to discover who I was.

Growing up in Charlotte, North Carolina, I struggled to find a sense of belonging in a community that did not accept me but accepted what my Blackness could give them. I wrestled with constantly being challenged to prove myself, not realizing that we are burdened with defending ourselves from the people we call our neighbors. Through music, Garifunas have told their story. But sadly, Punta is one of the countless Black musical movements that are having its history erased. The scene at my first fedu was unlike the music videos I grew up watching on YouTube where the Garifuna men would beat the drums, and the fair-skinned and dark-haired women would dance in front of them.

In my introduction to Punta, I saw my Blackness be celebrated. But to the rest of the world, their introduction to Punta showed my Blackness used as an accessory. Something you put on and take off when you are done with it. That’s why it is disheartening to watch the deliberate whitewashing of this sacred genre of music. The genre’s mainstream face is based on the misconception that Punta is the heartbeat of the Honduran people, the entirety of the country. In fact, this genre is rooted in a more specific community: the Garifuna people, the descendants of mixed West African and indigenous people that have historically resided on the Caribbean coast of Central America

Read the entire article here.

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Aline Motta and the personal diving into collective memory

Posted in Articles, Arts, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Interviews, Media Archive on 2022-03-29 20:28Z by Steven

Aline Motta and the personal diving into collective memory

ARTE!Brasileiros
2020-03-18

Marcos Grinspum Ferraz

“Pontes sobre Abismos #17”, Aline Motta, Foto: Cortesia da artista

The multimedia artist, one of the winners of the 7th Marcantonio Vilaça Award, departs from a thorough research on his family history to address major topics such as slavery, African heritage and a patriarchal structure that remains in Brazil today

The journey of artist Aline Motta looking for her roots and the vestiges of her ancestors is undoubtedly a personal endeavour. The result, however, concerns the collective memory of thousands of Brazilian families built (or destroyed) in the violent process of the country’s formation, based on slavery and patriarchal structure.

“It took a while for me to acquire some maturity and psychic centering to deal with issues so deep and difficult that concern my own history and family,” she says in an interview with ARTE!Brasileiros. This maturation time included not only some early artwork that dealt with other topics, carried out especially from the beginning of this decade, but also a vast trajectory as a continuist in movies, which commenced in 2001.

It was from 2016, when she had the project Pontes sobre Abismos (Bridges over Abysses) selected by Itaú Cultural’s Rumos program, that Motta, now 45, began to devote herself full-time to authorial work, with a multimedia production that did not leave aside cinema, but also unfolded in installations, photographs, texts, publications and performances…

Read the entire interview here.

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Twigs was born Tahliah Debrett Barnett in 1988, in Cheltenham, to an English/Spanish mother and a Jamaican father.

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2022-03-29 20:15Z by Steven

Twigs was born Tahliah Debrett Barnett in 1988, in Cheltenham, to an English/Spanish mother and a Jamaican father. She was also raised by a “jazz fanatic” Bajan stepfather. “What’s it like in Leeds?” she asks me with wide eyes. Assuming she’s asking what it’s like to be Black in Leeds, I tell her that, surprisingly, I had a more Black experience up north than I ever did living in London. “I definitely understand what you’re saying,” she says. “As a teenager, I started getting the bus to Gloucester to be around people who were from the same culture as me. I’ve never experienced such an intense West Indian experience as I did in Gloucester.”

Kadish Morris, “FKA twigs: ‘I don’t have secrets. I’m not ashamed of anything’,” The Guardian, March 26, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/mar/26/fka-twigs-i-dont-have-secrets-im-not-ashamed-of-anything.

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A brush with… Ellen Gallagher

Posted in Articles, Arts, Audio, Biography, History, Interviews, Media Archive, Slavery, United States on 2022-03-29 20:00Z by Steven

A brush with… Ellen Gallagher

The Week in Art
2021-06-30

Ellen Gallagher in her Rotterdam studio Photo: Philippe Vogelenzang Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

An in-depth conversation on the artist’s big influences, from Keith Haring to Moby Dick

In this episode of A brush with…, Ben Luke talks to the American artist Ellen Gallagher about her life and work by exploring her greatest cultural influences. Born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1965, Gallagher studied at Oberlin College in Ohio, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. She now lives in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Much of Gallagher’s parents’ ancestry—in particular her Black father who is from the Cape Verde archipelago off the west coast of Africa—defines the territory of her practice, which relates to the culture and language of the Black diaspora.

Though primarily working in painting and drawing, Gallagher has also worked in sculpture, film and animation. Her early style appears Minimalist and spare from a distance but, up close, one observes intricate drawings of eyes, lips and wigs, which Gallagher has described as “the disembodied ephemera of minstrelsy”—the racist blackface entertainment common in the US from the C19th onwards. In the early 2000s, she used cut-out advertisements from Black culture magazines and transformed them with plasticine, making sculptural reliefs that were often imprinted with witty or incisive symbols and imagery. Many of her paintings refer to the sea and allude to the Afrofuturist myth of Drexciya: a Black Atlantis at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, supposedly populated with the children of the mothers of enslaved African women who were thrown—or threw themselves—overboard during their forced journey across the Middle Passage

Read and/or listen to the interview here.

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Sucks that this needs repeating: “Black” “White” “Asian” “African” “European” are not biological groupings/categories or proxies thereof. Thus using such labels in genetic analyses is error laden. Great paper showing (yet again) how and why this is the case soon.

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2022-03-29 19:24Z by Steven

 

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Genetic ancestry in precision medicine is reshaping the race debate

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive on 2022-03-29 19:19Z by Steven

Genetic ancestry in precision medicine is reshaping the race debate

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Volume 119, Number 12, Article e2203033119
4 pages
2022-03-16
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2203033119

Talia Krainc
Department of Anthropology
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Agustín Fuentes, Professor of Anthropology
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

When including more diverse populations and ancestries in genetic and clinical studies, we need to avoid conflating race with biological identity. Image credit: Shutterstock/tai11.

Precision medicine is an emerging field with immense potential for better understanding of diseases and improved treatment outcomes (1). Its focus: patterns of human genetic variation in populations and individuals—and how such patterns influence disease pathology and treatment. The field rejects the “one size fits all” approach to understanding disease, aspiring to develop tailored therapies that optimize treatment efficacy. It’s a promising but fledgling field that faces numerous challenges, both scientific and practical. But one challenge has not been fully appreciated: the lack of genetic diversity in research and clinical studies (2, 3)…

Read the entire article here.

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So What Exactly Is ‘Blood Quantum’?

Posted in Articles, Audio, History, Interviews, Law, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2022-03-29 18:49Z by Steven

So What Exactly Is ‘Blood Quantum’?

Code Switch: Race. In Your Face.
National Public Radio
2018-02-09

Kat Chow

Blood quantum was initially a system that the federal government placed onto tribes in an effort to limit their citizenship.
Leigh Wells/Getty Images/Ikon Images


If you’re Native American, there’s a good chance that you’ve thought a lot about blood quantum — a highly controversial measurement of the amount of “Indian blood” you have. It can affect your identity, your relationships and whether or not you — or your children — may become a citizen of your tribe.

Blood quantum was initially a system that the federal government placed onto tribes in an effort to limit their citizenship. Many Native nations, including the Navajo Nation and the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, still use it as part of their citizenship requirements.

And how tribes use blood quantum varies from tribe to tribe. The Navajo Nation requires a minimum of 25 percent “Navajo blood,” and Turtle Mountain requires a minimum of 25 percent of any Indian blood, as long as its in combination with some Turtle Mountain.

Blood quantum minimums really restrict who can be a citizen of a tribe. If you’ve got 25 percent of Navajo blood — according to that tribe’s blood quantum standards — and you have children with someone who has a lower blood quantum, those kids won’t be able to enroll.

So why keep a system that’s decreasing your tribe’s rolls and could lead to its demise?

“I use the term ‘Colonial Catch 22’ to say that there is no clear answer, and that one way or another, people are hurt,” says Elizabeth Rule. She’s a doctoral candidate at Brown University who specializes in Native American studies, and also a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation.

“The systems are so complicated,” she explains, “but it’s all part of tribes deciding on their own terms, in their own ways, utilizing their own sovereignty [to decide] what approach is best for them.”

As we explored blood quantum in this week’s episode, we thought a primer of what, exactly, this system is and how it works — or doesn’t — might be useful. Here’s my interview with Elizabeth Rule, edited and condensed for clarity…

Read the entire story here.

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I’m Biracial, But Rejected My Blackness For Years. Here’s Why I Stopped Passing For White.

Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Canada, Media Archive, Passing on 2022-03-29 18:32Z by Steven

I’m Biracial, But Rejected My Blackness For Years. Here’s Why I Stopped Passing For White.

The Huffington Post
2022-03-24

Eleanor Beaton, Guest Writer

The author (left) with her mother. PHOTO COURTESY OF ELEANOR BEATON

“Unknowingly, I started to reject all of the parts of myself that were Black.”

The school bus screeched to a halt. My mother, a Black Fijian woman who proudly embraced her natural ’fro, was waiting for me at the bus stop.

“Bye, n***a,” another kid said loudly, as I got up from my seat.

As an adult, due to my mixed heritage, many people describe me as “white-appearing” or racially ambiguous. But in Nova Scotia in the 1980s — with my tanned skin and thick curly hair in a sea of whiteness — I was reminded on a daily basis that I was different. I was an other. No matter how hard I tried, I would never blend in.

I asked my white father to fetch me from the bus stop going forward…

Read the entire article here.

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Colin Kaepernick Campaigns for N.F.L. Return With Pop-Up Workouts

Posted in Articles, Media Archive, United States on 2022-03-29 02:19Z by Steven

Colin Kaepernick Campaigns for N.F.L. Return With Pop-Up Workouts

The New York Times
2022-03-27

Emmanuel Morgan

Colin Kaepernick worked out for N.F.L. scouts and media in 2019 at a high school in Riverdale, Ga. Todd Kirkland/Associated Press

As teams snatch up quarterbacks in free agency, Kaepernick has been quickly organizing workouts around the country and posting them to social media.

LOS ANGELES — In the five years since he last played in an N.F.L. game, Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who ignited an international debate on athletes’ right to protest, has only sporadically surfaced in public. Accepting an award here, or rolling out a Netflix series there, Kaepernick has in those calculated appearances always affirmed that he was “staying ready” for a return to football.

This month, he has taken a new approach, organizing pop-up workouts that are often scrapped together in less than 24 hours in cities across the country. On Friday at U.C.L.A.’s practice facility, most of the receivers who fielded his passes were still in high school or enrolled in junior colleges. Last week in a workout posted to his Instagram account, Kaepernick threw to Seattle Seahawks receiver Tyler Lockett in Arizona, after plotting to meet via Twitter.

In workouts in Atlanta, New Orleans and three other cities, he corralled workout partners with a range of experience through previous connections and word of mouth using the sessions as a public forum to showcase his talents and potentially solicit an N.F.L. audition…

Read the entire article here.

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FKA twigs: ‘I don’t have secrets. I’m not ashamed of anything’

Posted in Articles, Arts, Caribbean/Latin America, Interviews, Media Archive, United Kingdom on 2022-03-29 02:07Z by Steven

FKA twigs: ‘I don’t have secrets. I’m not ashamed of anything’

The Guardian
2022-03-26

Kadish Morris, Editor, Critic & Poet

FKA twigs: ‘I think vulnerability is really hot.’ Photograph: Aidan Zamiri/The Guardian

After a hellish couple of years, the pop visionary is back. She talks about beating illness, escaping abuse, and the joy of connecting with her Caribbean roots

FKA twigs isn’t special, she says, she just rehearses a lot. “I don’t think I was born with anything more than the rest of the world,” says the 34-year-old singer-songwriter. It might be hard to believe that anybody could do the splits down a pole or wield a sword, Wushu-style, the way twigs has done without possessing some divine powers, but it’s all in the training. She can afford private lessons now, but when she started out as a fresh-faced back-up dancer, YouTube tutorials and group dance classes helped her to perfect her craft. “I practise and I practise and I practise. That’s who I am.”

Twigs has had a spellbinding career, exploding on to the pop scene a decade ago with operatic vocal arrangements, conceptual videos and futuristic instrumentals. In 2014 the New Yorker magazine said that she “dresses like a high-fashion model from antiquity, but her songs promise the very contemporary pleasures of texture and emotional immediacy”. Since then, she’s released several acclaimed albums and is considered a trailblazer in pop, R&B and Afrofuturism

Read the entire interview here.

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